ROUNDTABLE; Left Behind

Published: March 6, 2005

Peter Beinart, the editor of The New Republic; Michael Tomasky, the executive editor of The American Prospect; and Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation, are three leading voices for liberalism today. Now, following the re-election of George W. Bush, and with the continuing dominance of Republicans in Congress, the politics they stand for is arguably more embattled than at any time since 1933 and Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Barry Gewen, an editor at the Book Review, asked the three editors to discuss and debate the present state of liberalism in America, and its future.

Why has ''liberal'' become a dirty word for so many Americans today?

VANDEN HEUVEL. I would begin with the unrelenting assault on the term liberalism by the right wing. It has been a project over the last few decades. And by failing to take their own side in the argument liberals have conceded -- to the point where John Kerry was wary of being associated with liberalism in one of the debates. Liberals have also paid a heavy price by allowing liberalism to be defined almost exclusively as social liberalism. So that you lost sight of economic rights, economic justice.

TOMASKY. I essentially agree with that. But liberal concepts still have more resonance than you might think. Polls continually show that people are rhetorically conservative and operationally liberal or progressive.

BEINART. Yes, the term needs to be defended. But I think one also needs to recognize that while people may be conceptually liberal, they're not voting for enough liberals. Liberals need to look at how they grew estranged from large numbers of Americans in the post-Vietnam period. And I think another estrangement has occurred since 9/11. Many Americans have questions about the degree to which liberals are willing to defend the country.

VANDEN HEUVEL. A majority of Americans support an America that works with international institutions, that wants a strengthened U.N., that wants to be part of a constructive multilateral engagement with the world. And that is ignored by too many liberals because it doesn't seem like a winning strategy.

TOMASKY. I want to move on to the cultural issues here for a moment, because they are obviously quite important in what's happened to liberalism. There's a conversation that's going to have to happen with regard to issues like gay marriage. Was it pursued in the right way in 2004, either by the Massachusetts court or by [the mayor of San Francisco] Gavin Newsom? And abortion is obviously a very vexing question. Has the rhetoric that's used to defend abortion rights really defended the core principle well? Or does that rhetoric need to change?

VANDEN HEUVEL. We need to make a distinction between the first-principles conversation and the one on electoral winning strategies. And I think that becomes tricky. But on the gay marriage issue, for example, we are a more tolerant country than we were 20, 30 years ago.

BEINART. I think one of the great problems in the debates about abortion and gay rights is the perception that liberals are illiberal and nondemocratic. It's remarkable to me how many people still mention the fact that [the anti-abortion Pennsylvania governor] Bob Casey was denied the right to speak at the 1992 Democratic convention. That was an illiberal thing the party did. And there is an important debate for liberals to have about the role of the courts in pushing social change. Finally, I don't think you can separate these questions from people's larger concerns about the culture. Liberals should believe in free speech, of course, but there is no reason that liberals need to believe that everything that comes out of an unregulated free market is good culturally.

VANDEN HEUVEL. I agree that too often liberalism has become associated with license instead of liberty. But you know that among progressives there is a critique of this kind of free-market vulgar culture, which is promoted not by The Nation or The American Prospect or The New Republic but by Fox television.

TOMASKY. Parents do worry about what their kids are seeing, what their kids are being exposed to. I'm no prude but sometimes I'm surprised by what I see on television or what I see in commercials.

VANDEN HEUVEL. Again, we need to make the case that these are not our values, but without diminishing the liberal belief in free speech.

BEINART. Democratic politicians who made this the biggest issue, Tipper Gore and then Joe Lieberman, both faced a fair degree of ridicule from within their own ranks. Neither of them as far as I can tell was advocating censorship.

What would a liberal foreign policy look like?

TOMASKY. A kind of principled realism. First, terrorism is a threat. It threatened our shores more directly than the Soviet Union ever did. And it must be the focus of a foreign policy. We need alliances, yes. But alliances are a means. The end is the isolation of terrorists and the states that harbor them. The end is the control of nuclear proliferation, an extremely serious issue that the Bush administration sort of ignores. And the end is bringing liberty to the places of the world where it doesn't exist.